Tuesday, 8 November 2016

Life used to be so simple at one time for most of us, get up in the morning, drink coffee, go to work, come home and have dinner.

How things have changed where more and more of us have become freelance or self-employed. Juggling all the things we need to remember for our work, with shopping, children, the list can become endless.

For note taking and projects I use OneNote and have done for years.

To-do List Google Keep

But when it comes to creating a to-do list for the day, items like writing a blog, making a list of the research that needs to be done, what I need to buy when I get to the supermarket, calls that I need to returned, it is difficult to remember everything, something always gets missed out.

Yes I can create the lists in OneNote, but I forget to look, plus I don’t want my calendar booked up with appointments that are not appointments, I just want a simple reminder with a checklist that that forces me to take action and complete the items on my list.

This is where the magic of Google Keep comes in, it has reminders built in that gets added to my google calendar.

For example, I would create maybe 3 or 4 lists per day, one for tasks that need to be done in the morning including taking the dog for a walk (yes I do overlook her sometimes) A shopping list with a location reminder, so when I pull into the car park at the supermarket or whatever shop I’m going to, it will spring up on my cell phone with a checklist for what I need to buy, this way I don’t get earache when I get home for forgetting an item.

To me this is invaluable, it makes life easy, I am sure it you will find it easy too.

Google Keep is very simple to use as a checklist with reminders, I have made a small video showing how easy it is, though I do apologise, there is no sound, my microphone packed in, something else I need to add to my reminders.

Thursday, 3 November 2016

The other day I was
swapping over my email hosting provider, instead of having separate mailboxes
and accounts I thought I would consolidate my different domains into one single
account, then create aliases for the different email addresses that I use.

Great plan I thought,
save a bit of money, free up some inboxes have all the mail arrive into one
mailbox.

After downloading the Bluemail app, setting it up took roughly 5 minutes, everything was working and syncing
across nicely, I could use my aliases without a problem, great, next step was
to set the mail accounts up on my laptop.

Now the laptop I use has
windows 10 on it and I have been using Outlook since the day it came out way
back then, I was quite happy until that very second I remembered that Microsoft
in their wisdom had not come up with a good and easy way of using aliases. I
cursed a little and had a couple cups of coffee.

Using outlook means that
I would need to setup a separate account for each alias or create the IMAP
accounts and create a pop only account for sending mail, seems a messy way of
doing things, so I decided to look at alternatives.

The one we will talk
about today is the new kid on the block, it is made by a company called opera
company famed by its browser “opera”.

It had downloaded in an
impressive 30 seconds, wow I was raring to go, eager to see what it was like,
the setup wizard like most asked for my email address and password first, 5
seconds later I was on the next stage, to my great surprise that was the end of
the wizard, it wanted me to enter my details manually.

I entered in my details
while muttering under my breath to find out it would not accept it, the server
settings is limited, so I scrapped the idea of using a private email address
and used my outlook.com account for sharing my experience with you.

After entering the
details manually, it started to sync my emails across, note that there is not
any ssl settings, only tls.

The mail syncs fine, it
is separated by day and month with the reading pane on the right, though that
can be changed to the bottom or just have a list.

The only contacts listed
was from the emails, those contacts that I had not sent or received from was
not synced, neither is there a calendar, tasks or notes, though you can
subscribe to RSS feeds it.

If you are only looking
for the most simple and basic of email clients, and you are comfortable setting
up the accounts manually then it would be fine for you.